Category: ACORN India

Swedish furniture manufacturer IKEA is the latest retail store set to expand into India. The government wants to attract much-needed infrastructure – while many shop owners fear for their livelihood.

Praveen Khandelwal’s hardware store in Delhi employs some 15 people. But soon, the shop owner fears, they might all lose their jobs – and with it, their livelihood.

“International companies will grab the entire retail trade,” Khandelwal told DW. He is afraid that there will be no room for small-scale retailers like him. “Foreign companies will rule India!”

For a long time, India had very restrictive rules on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). But in the last couple of years, restrictions have been loosened. In June, 2012, the government made some changes to its policies, allowing foreign retailers to operate with less restrictions in the country.

This, according to Gareth Price, a Senior Research Fellow at the British think-tank Chatham House, was aimed at building up much-needed infrastructure in particular in the agricultural sector. “India’s supply chain management is very poor. A lot of food is wasted before it even reaches the shops,” Gareth told DW. India, he added, lacked the resources to improve its infrastructure – the reason the ruling Congress Party decided to open the country to foreign investment.

Several foreign companies, including Wal-Mart, were quick to set up shop following the liberalization.

Highly divisive policies

In November, the government went even further, allowing for full ownership of local subsidiaries by foreign companies. Previously, foreign ownership had been limited to 51 percent.

Furniture manufacturer IKEA is the latest international retailer set to expand into India. On Tuesday, January 22, an Indian Commerce Ministry official said that the Investment Board had approved the Swedish company’s 1.9-billion-dollar investment proposal. IKEA announced it planned to open 25 stores in India over the next 15 to 20 years. The Cabinet, however, has yet to approve the bill and some Members of Parliament have already voiced their opposition. The opposition BJP party said that it would reverse the decision after the next elections, Price from Chatham House said.

The issue of foreign investment is highly divisive. Many Indians, Price said, fear that hundreds of thousands of jobs might be lost in the retail sector, one of the biggest employers in India.

“They will spread”

Dharmendra Kumar is one of them. “We’re not so concerned about IKEA,” the social activist with India FDI Watch, told DW. “They only make furniture, they won’t have much impact.” But he is concerned that while so far only a minority of India’s states have passed the FDI laws, others may soon follow suit. “And once they get here, they will spread.”

It was only a matter of time, he added, before foreign companies would start to have an impact on supply chains, dictate prices and force small- and medium-sized producers out of business.

With a little help from abroad

Amita Arora Puri from the All India Artisans and Craftworkers Association takes a less bleak view: IKEA with its “unmatched funds and global expertise” could help local artisans and traders to improve their designs, product quality and production abilities,” Puri told DW.

“The domestic private sector is looking for intellectual property of how foreign firms are doing things,” Price agrees. He added that, given India’s red tape and often excessive bureaucracy, foreign companies might find it hard to operate in India, letting the domestic sector take over. “That would seem a perfectly plausible outcome in the retail sector.”

Or, in one Twitter users’ laconic words: “50 percent of Ikea’s sales in India will be to furniture manufacturers who want to steal their designs.”

But Price doesn’t think that many foreign companies will commit themselves to India just yet, given the political opposition to the liberalization move. After all, he told DW, the opening was “reversible.”

Shop owner Praveen Khandelwal, for one, isn’t planning to wait and see. He wants to take his fear to the streets. “We’re working on a campaign against the foreign retailers,” he told DW, referring to a group of shop owners and retailers. “Just wait.”

http://www.dw.de/anger-grows-as-foreign-retailers-enter-india/a-16545485

The Supreme Court today said that interest of small retail traders should not be affected due to foreign direct investment (FDI) in retail sector and sought response from the Centre on how it intends to safeguard their interests.

A bench headed by Justice R M Lodha asked the Centre to file its response within three weeks.

“What checks are there to ensure that free trade is not affected, particularly the interest of small traders,” the bench said while hearing a public interest litigation (PIL).

“Apprehension is there in the mind of people that small traders’ interest would be affected,” the bench said, adding, “Some regulatory measures should be there.”

http://www.indianexpress.com/news/retail-fdi-how-will-you-protect-small-traders-supreme-court-asks-govt/1063049/

Tuesday, January 08, 2013

Aarefa Johari, Hindustan Times

January 06, 2013

Email to Author

First Published: 01:04 IST(6/1/2013)

Last Updated: 01:07 IST(6/1/2013)

Dharavi-ology

American writer Joseph Campana first discovered the world of Dharavi when he signed up for a slum tour in April 2008, and came back fascinated. An English teacher at an international school in Mumbai, Campana, with a batch of Class 7 students, meandered through Dharavi’s potters’ colony, recycling quarters and papad-making area, getting glimpses of life in the city’s most well-known slum settlement.

“I was struck by how many people there were, walking up and down, engaged in various businesses, full of energy,” says Campana, who lived in Mumbai till 2011 and then returned to Montana, USA. “It was astounding.”

In November 2008, non-profit organisation Acorn Foundation India invited Campana to compile and edit a book about life in the slum.

When this book, a collection of 24 essays by prominent city journalists, hits the shelves in February, it will be the latest addition to an expanding tapestry of narratives on Dharavi.

The book’s tentative title —Everybody Loves Dharavi — is a striking indication of the phenomenon that this slum has become: In the past decade, as books, films, and research papers studying various facets of Dharavi have increased, the slum has become a magnet for visitors of every kind — tourists, students, architects, writers and social workers.

Dharavi is not the only settlement of the urban poor in Mumbai, and it is certainly not the poorest.

Where, then, does its unique appeal lie? For most, the answer is Dharavi’s socio-cultural diversity.

“Dharavi is not one slum. It is a group of contiguous settlements where each nagar has its own distinct history and ethos. It’s an amazing mix of India,” says journalist Kalpana Sharma, author of Rediscovering Dharavi, one of the first books on Dharavi published in 2000.

Dharavi is also a slum of entrepreneurs, with small-scale businesses operating in every other hutment.

“It is a slum of hope, not despair, and people are attracted by that positive energy,” says Rashmi Bansal, co-author of the 2012 book Poor Little Rich Slum.

In the midst of this frenzied anthropological curiosity, some are now sceptical about the ethics of turning the people of Dharavi into passive subjects of research work that they have little access to.

The slum’s residents have always have mixed views — be it indignation, indifference or an interest in visitors — but now, researchers are questioning their own roles.

British artist Ben Parry believes that Dharavi has been ‘fetishised’.

Five months ago, he launched a project called Reversing the Gaze to get Dharavi locals to question visiting outsiders and maintain an archive of all the research material in which they have been featured.

While this highlights the need for researchers to be sensitive, their work has a bright side too.

“Because of constant research, people in Dharavi have become more assertive,” says Anita Patil-Deshmukh, executive director of non-profit urban research organisation Pukar.

“They have understood their contribution to the city and know that their land is precious. I hope that they have learnt how to leverage this knowledge for their own benefit.”

Interview: Ben Parry, British visual artist

Looking back at the world

London-based visual artist Ben Parry came to Mumbai a year ago on a research residency with urban think tank URBZ to study how informal urban practices, such as street vending, appropriate space.

While exploring Dharavi, Parry grew conscious of his presence as an outsider and began to question the ethics of his research.

In September, he launched Dharavi: Reversing the Gaze, a project that helps residents examine researchers’ norms of knowledge production and consumption.

The ongoing project is being run by Parry, American filmmaker Sean Flynn and NGOs Acorn Foundation and CAMP.

What drew you to Dharavi and then question your role as a researcher?

Dharavi’s worlds are compelling on so many levels, not least for their ability to have endured the city’s expansion whilst creating conditions in which so many were able to rise out of poverty.

But my presence as an outsider signalled the possibility of a threat — doing harm by critiquing and exposing unregulated practices.

Rather than dismiss the presence of the specialist or tourist as an ‘uninvited guest’, I felt compelled to think deeply about the implications of my own presence in a muddled neo-colonial narrative of perceived exploitation and the fetishisation of slum life as representative of the urban poor.

Why should researchers worry about such things?

In Dharavi I see a disconnect between reality and representation. Since its residents have little or no control over their own representations and are mostly oblivious to the context and consequences of how these representations are consumed, the ethics of the anthropological gaze remains in crisis.

Tell us about Reversing the Gaze.

The project involves former residents of the 13th Compound, one of the most iconic images of Dharavi, until they were evicted last year from their homes near the pipeline at Mahim — reproduced in films and documentaries and endlessly photographed. Yet the community had no documented history of its own.

With a group of five women and two men from the area we have identified former residents and begun to trace displacement.

Through a video booth, they can interview researchers coming in. To close this loop of documenter and subject, I began printing photographs of Dharavi, tracing their subjects, such as the Kumbharwada boy featured on the cover of National Geographic magazine, and giving a copy back to them.

© Copyright © 2012 HT Media Limited. All Rights Reserved.

Please check out Dharmendra Kumar on Al Jazeera.